The Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts has revealed its first set of confirmed guest writers for the 2025 festival, the 42nd instance of the three-day event since its founding in 1983.
The mid-August gathering of the Canadian literary community attracts an audience of as many as 7,000 people to Sechelt’s Rockwood Pavilion and its grounds.
Journalist and author Carol Off will deliver the Rockwood Lecture. Off, who released her book At a Loss for Words in September, follows another CBC broadcaster in delivering the keynote address — in 2024, Victoria-based radio host Gregor Craigie explored issues related to Canada’s housing crisis.
Off was co-host of the CBC Radio current affairs program As It Happens for 16 years; her latest book analyzes six words whose meanings have recently become mangled and politicized (like democracy, freedom, and truth).
“One of the very first authors I invited was Carol Off,” said the festival’s artistic and executive director Marisa Alps. “Because as soon as I heard about At a Loss for Words, I thought that would be a wonderful topic for the Rockwood Lecture and this larger discussion about how language is evolving and changing very quickly in today’s climate.”
Acclaimed novelist Guy Vanderhaeghe (whose latest book, Because Somebody Asked Me To, is a collection of reflective essays) is also among the more than two dozen guest writers announced so far. Vanderhaeghe rocketed to fame in the early 2000s for his best-selling “frontier trilogy” that included The Englishman’s Boy and The Last Crossing.
Novelist and poet Jane Urquhart, whose novel In Winter I Get Up at Night was longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize, has also confirmed her participation. The festival focuses exclusively on Canadian writers.
Alps is also seeking to highlight books published by independent local publishers. Secwépemc poet Garry Gottfriedson’s book The Flesh of Ice was published by Caitlin Press, a Vancouver Island publishing house that was formerly headquartered on the Sunshine Coast.
Gottfriedson is one of two Indigenous guest authors from B.C.’s Interior; the other is Brian Thomas Isaac of the Syilx Nation. Isaac won an Indigenous Voices Award for his debut novel All the Quiet Places, and this month will release his coming-of-age novel Bones of a Giant.
Two other presenting authors — lawyer and historian Bruce McIvor and David Robertson, a two-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award — will present their latest works during a session moderated by Sunshine Coast-based scholar Daniel Heath Justice.
“This event is very important to me,” said Alps. “Bruce’s book is all about giving people the opportunity to define terms that most people don’t understand when they say ‘treaty rights’ or ‘land back.’ And Daniel’s book is about ways that people can really incorporate reconciliation into their lives; it really helps incorporate reconciliation into your life in a meaningful way.”
Halfmoon Bay resident Lorna Goodison (who received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2020) will discuss her newly released translation, which transposes Dante’s The Inferno into a Jamaican setting using Jamaican vernacular.
Two qathet-based writers — editor and writer Andrea Bennett and memoirist Charlotte Gill — will be featured as part of a session dedicated to Sunshine Coast authors, moderated by Megan Cole. Cole directs programming and communications for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes from her headquarters in Powell River.
“There are definitely things I hunt for when creating the lineup of writers,” added Alps. “And then other things just kind of happen very organically. There’s always a reason why I invite an author, whether I think the topic is important or the writing is just beautiful or I feel it would really connect with a particular festival-goer.”
A returning feature of the festival will be a writing workshop, this year led by novelist and short story writer Caroline Adderson. Adderson won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize for her 2003 novel Sitting Practice and released her latest collection of short stories, A Way to Be Happy, last year.
A full list of writers confirmed so far is published online at writersfestival.ca. Ticket sales will also become available on the website effective Monday, June 2.
